Direct Marketing is a recent activity that has come up and is used extensively by the industrial marketers. The various tools used in direct marketing are direct mails, telemarketing and online marketing channels. A direct marketing channel does not involve any intermediary and the sale is done by the company by directly contacting the target customer. As the cost involved in direct marketing activity is much less compared to the cost of company sales force directly meeting the customers, many industrial organizations prefer this tool. This tool aids the sales force to gain entry into prospective customer’s office where prospective customers are identified beforehand and are informed about the company products.
Direct Mail
The existing and prospective customers are mailed promotional letters, catalogs, CD’s etc. by the industrial marketers where they are provided with necessary information about the company’s products and services and any schemes or offers it has. This helps the potential customers to respond the company that in turn would send its sales force to meet them personally and close the sales. Though this is one of the cheapest tool used by the industrial marketers, they should be careful about the selection of target audience as wrong identification would waste the entire efforts. Even the prospects’ correct contact details should be available to avoid wastage of mails. Generally, mailing lists are obtained by companies from websites, telephone companies, trade publications, mailing list brokers, industrial directories, company’s database etc.
Telemarketing
In this process, prospective customers are contacted through telephone and provided with all the required information and then converted to sales lead depending on their interest towards the company product. Sometimes, people who are self-interested in a company and seek information about a product or service also call the company after getting telephone numbers from various sources like telephone directory, advertisement etc. Telemarketing helps the companies to reduce their sales force and increase the sales volume provided the companies have trained personnel who can talk effectively over phone.
Online Marketing Channels
These are the recent tools that have come up after the advent of internet and information technology. They are used by many industrial marketers for direct marketing of their products where they use this tool to find, reach, communicate and sell to organizational buyers. There are certain advantages of online marketing like being very cost-effective as even small organizations can use it, and accessing and retrieving the information is fast. But, unless an user has a computer system with modem attached and is computer literate, it does not make sense using this channel.